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52 of the world's poorest countries (of which 37 are in Africa) owe a total of $376 billion in debt. The repayments for this huge amount of money take up a very large portion of each country's income to, leaving them with little left to help themselves and solve their hunger problems.

The areas where chronic persistent hunger occurs need capital and resources to develop and implement schemes to help solve their problems. Cancelling world debt would provide these countries with the ability to help themselves, such as being able to develop their economy in order to safeguard against future hunger problems, develop and import technologies to begin and increase the amount of output from their arable land or help fund imports of food from abroad, helping to solve the redistribution problem

The G7 (Group of seven), the seven countries with the largest economies in the world, pledged to cancel $100 billion of this debt in June 1999. An impressive figure, but actually, lending governments already know they are not going to receive most of this $100 billion back and have made provisions to cover their losses. So although this is a good start, in many countries it will have no significant impact on their payments - it is cost-free, and also benefit-free. If the debt being cancelled is debt that could never have been paid anyway, this will have little impact on the repayments for poor countries.

Many countries are pledging to cancel 100% of the debt owed to them if certain conditions are meet. For example, an extract from a speech Bill Clinton made on October 12th 1999, archived on the US State Department's website says:

"Last month, I went even further, announcing that the United States will forgive 100 percent of the debt owed us by the world's least developed countries if they will use the savings to address basic human needs. And I committed the United States to a new effort to accelerate the development of vaccines for diseases that devastate the developing world." - Bill Clinton

You can help these poorer countries by supporting and helping those groups and individuals who are trying to convince their governments to cancel world debt. Your support could give a debt free start to 1 billion people, and help to solve the world's hunger problem. Alternatively you can support online by clicking a button at http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1 where advertisers will donate 1 1/2 cups of staple food to a hungry person.